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Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Dividend Update - February 2016

It's the end of one month and the beginning of another so it's time for my favorite update: my dividend update. These dividend updates reflect all dividends that I receive through my investing pursuits. I hope they can help inspire you to take control of your own finances and invest to build a passive income stream. What you use that stream for is up to you, whether it's to fund early retirement, just provide some FI/FU money, or even to provide for an annual vacation; the key is that it can provide options and open up all sorts of possibilities. You can check my dividend income or progress pages to see what dedication to an investment plan can give you.

February's dividend haul was a pretty solid bump up from January's start to the year. I received a total of $311.11 in dividends within my FI Portfolio during the month. I also received $1.24 in my Loyal3 Portfolio bringing my total taxable account dividends to $312.35. I have a small Roth IRA Portfolio as well; however, none of the positions pay dividends in February so it was a big fat zero for the month. Across all three accounts, excluding the effect of taxes, I received $312.35 in dividends during February and have received $618.75 year to date.

FI Portfolio

My FI Portfolio showed a decline of 25.7% and 12.8% on both a quarter over quarter and year over year basis, respectively. While the comparisons look pretty bleak much of that is due to the dividend cut and me subsequently closing my position in Kinder Morgan, Inc. (KMI) during December 2015. On a constant payout basis, i.e. the same companies paying across both periods, the year over year increase came to 10.4%. Much of the increase was attributed to dividend increases. Year to date I've received $579.78 in dividends.

Loyal3 Portfolio

On the surface my Loyal3 Portfolio was a bit of a disappointment as well with a 62.5% quarterly decline, but a solid 18.1% year over year increase. The quarter over quarter decline was due to management at Kraft-Heinz Company (KHC) apparently unable to make up their mind on a dividend payout schedule. On a constant payout basis the year over year comparison comes to 18.1% with Apple (AAPL) being the only contributor. Year to date I've received $11.07 in dividends.

Roth IRA Portfolio

The comparisons are easy to make for my Roth IRA Portfolio since no dividends were received across any of the time periods. So no increases were realized, but no declines either. Year to date I've received $27.90 in dividends within my Roth IRA.

Dividend Raises During the Month

A total of 6 of my holdings announced increases during February which is dividend growth investing at its finest. You mean a company I own a piece of, albeit tiny, wants to pay out more of their profits to me just because I own part of the company? Sign me up! What was really cool about the dividend increases during February was the diversity of industry representation. An industrial conglomerate, some beverage and snack giants, an asset manager, the worlds largest retailer and a bank joined in as well. Combined dividend increases have increased my forward 12-month dividends by $52.76 without me contributing to their operations.

Looking Forward

My forward 12-month dividends for my FI Portfolio are up to $5,552.21. Forward dividends in my Loyal3 Portfolio ended the month at $62.47 bringing the total taxable account forward dividends to $5,614.68. My Roth IRA's forward 12-month dividends declined by about $17 due to closing my Wal-Mart (WMT) position and sit at $253.35.

Monthly Average

Below is the chart showing the monthly dividend totals for each year that I've been investing as well as the monthly average. It's not always an increase as some companies have weird payout schedules and eventually some positions will get dropped, but the long-term trend is what matters. The rolling 3-month average is $473.57 which is a slight decline from the $492.19 average for 2015.

8 comments:

Sorry to see all the drops (largely due to KMI and Kraft) but it goes to show that because you diversified so much, you weren't hit as bad as you could have been. I personally don't own either and haven't ever. Moving forward, my own goal is to have a single month payout of $50 or over. If I keep investing at the tread that I am, I should be able to reach it. We'll see at the end of 2016! Market volatility will likely continue as it rights itself but if we're in solid companies, we should both even out very quickly.

Obviously I don't like seeing the drops but they haven't been that bad overall. The diversification of my portfolio is doing it's job and the other companies I own are helping to rebuild the lost dividends. We'd likely be ahead of where we were if we had been reinvesting the proceeds from the sales we've made but we needed to build up cash so we've been withdrawing the sales proceeds.

Just to be clear the Kraft payment was actually for the same amount QoQ they're just a bit squirrely with their payout schedule.

It's great to see your portfolio get up to a $50 level but what really kind of showed me that this is a viable strategy was getting to the $100 per month mark. Volatility is your friend when you're building up your portfolio. The dip to start the year offered some pretty good values but most of them are gone now. All the best in your journey and I'll be checking out your blog soon.

Just found your site. Excellent stuff! I see you are using dividends as your passive income vehicle. I am currently working on putting together as many passive income vehicles as i can find and then comparing them. If you have seen a comprehensive list please let me know.

I'm glad you found my site and hope to have you back as a regular reader. Roadmap2Retire has a list of "passivity" which does a good job giving an overview of various income sources. I think he usually links to it in his monthly passive income updates but a quick Google search will do the trick.

Personally I want to build up my DGI portfolio and then possibly get some investment real estate in the future as well. That's about it for our passive income plans.

Six dividend increases - that's great, congratulations! A pity about KMI, but such is the life of a dividend growth investor. I took it on the chin with COP and recently also BBL. I sold my COP shares but haven't yet decided what to do with BBL, hence no updates on that. Keep up the good work!

Your update reflects the very nature of long term dividend investing... we take to the good (dividend increases) with the bad (dividend cuts). As long as your overall income increases every year you know you are headed in the right direction. What path is taken without any bumps? Nice to see quite a few names in common paying us for the month too. Always nice to see when others have similar holdings to my portfolio. Thanks for sharing.

It's inevitable that along the way some of the companies you own are going to cut their dividend or underperform. Which is why it's important to keep up to date on the companies and check their financial statements too. If we had been reinvesting the proceeds from our sales over the last 3-4 months we'd likely be ahead of where we were prior to the dividend cuts. That really speaks to the power of DGI over the long run.

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